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| The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1172 reviews
Sales Rank: 191
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 672
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0312425074
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9780312425074
ASIN: 0312425074
Publication Date: August 7, 2007
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| Customer Reviews:
 Friedman: Journalism with a hyperthyroid problem April 7, 2005
131 out of 200 found this review helpful
Shiva Vaidhyanathan ("The Anarchist in the Library") identified Friedman as "Someone who specializes in writing glib, vastly simplified articles on very complicated topics." Vaidhyanathan pointed out how Friedman's first reaction after 9/11 was to blame the Internet as "the technology most responsible for this catastrophe."
Gee, Tom, you don't think that would be "the airplane?"
I've always hated Friedman. He writes with a manic quality that dodges left and right around inconvenient details or moral evaluations. He simultaneously believes that history has a purpose AND that those who oppose anything that happens in the world are being head-in-the-sanders and obstructionists. He's an 'anti-normativist'--if something in the world happens, then, according to Friedman, it was clearly meant to happen and is surely for the best.
Personally, I'm waiting to see his reaction when the New York Times realizes they can get someone to write in favor of global outsourcing for 1/10th his salary by outsourcing their column-writing duties to India.
This book should cost US $3 (150 Indian rupees) April 8, 2005
115 out of 168 found this review helpful
Books are much cheaper in India. When this book will be published in India, it would likely be priced around 150 rupees or so. I am sure publishers in India will be very glad to sell Americans this book for around $5. However, this won't happen because guess what. While preaching us about the virtues of outsourcing and 'globalization,' as is the standard among American authors, Mr. Friedman (or his agent) to best of my guess would have been busy forcing publishers in India to sign restrictive covenants not allowing them to export his books to the USA. Guess why? At lower prices, he would be making only 30 cents a book as against $3 a book, as currently. Outsource others' job that is globalization, outsource my job, I will see you in court!
I will just add a few random points of mine.
India as an Economic Power: As it stands today, India's per capita GDP is less than 1/50th that of the USA. If India continues to have a growth differential of about 4% compared to the USA (about 7% annual growth vs USA's 3% growth) year-after-year, my calculator tells me that it will take 100 years for India to catch up with the USA. This is the best-case scenario for India. Growth might slow and other problems might arise, meanwhile.
Medical Care as the next outsourcing wave: Only recently, I was reading in an Indian magazine, modern hospitals being set up in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore, where citizens of the developed nations can obtain medical care at a fraction of the cost in their home countries. Good for these nations and the peole setting up these medical facilities.
On the other hand I read about millions of children losing their lives each year because of poor access to medical care. Many of them are in India. Also, I have seen names of many India plastic surgeons, who after emigrating to the USA are performing operations like tummy tucking and breast augmentation. Friedman has seen the future and I too agree that breast augmentation is the most pressing need of humanity today.
kamalsinha dot com
 Grass is not that green on the other side, really! April 6, 2005
85 out of 118 found this review helpful
I tend to agree with the other reviewer "Sandeep". I fear that this book might have the reverse effect of what it intends. The common man on the streets of NY or Cleveland may not grasp the ultimate analysis of this book. Somehow, the idea that the development of the thirld world vis-a-vis the first world is not a zero sum game is counter-intuitive. At least so to the simpleton on the street above. For him this will just reinforce his fears that the Indians are taking his job! The cheap American politics of today out to exploit every such anxiety can and will make the matters worse.
Another point I have, Case in point-India and Bangalore. The reality of India has not really changed dramatically. Rampant corruption, totally inadequate infrastructure, poverty, illiteracy still plague the country. The ad-hoc strategies for development (if there is such a thing) in India by the utterly incompetent political leaders meet with near zero efficiency implementation. It is really the middle class (which admittedly is huge by western population standards) that, feeling the survival pressures is driving the young generation towards higher education. It is these new "techies" that one meets at the airports of San Jose or JFK. They do not represent more than 10% of Indians. The techie in Bangalore after solving the problems of John Smith of DC, has to return back, feeling his way about in the dark without proper street lighting, afraid for his safety due to poor law and order, in buses that are filthy and overcrowded, to a home where the electricity is out due to a power cut. Many of the glitzy bangalore IT companies have to run noisy, fume spewing diesel electricity generators due to the frequent power cuts. Some have taken to the temporary solutions of erecting small self contained colonies around their campuses. But it is a self defeating enterprise. They might have glitzy fast food joints to feed their employees, but are they going to have their own waste treatment plants? and their own water treatment plants, food shops, transportation, gas stations, railways, airports?? Ultimately the inefficient infrastructure of the country is going to bog them down! These things might make one realize that India and other similar countries are way behind what westeners are afraid of.
Why should we read this? September 18, 2005
70 out of 80 found this review helpful
Tom Friedman is a well connected journalist. His columns appear on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and his previous works LONGITUDES AND ATTITUDES and THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE are part of the "conventional wisdom" of most American decision makers. This new book, THE WORLD IS FLAT will also find its way into the "conventional wisdom." Unfortunately, it is at best a misdiagnosis of the factors that have lead to the ability to substitute labor across geographical boundaries. However, although it is as wrong as could be, many of our power elites will read or hear of this, and will base their decisions on the assumption that this book contains the truth. The reason that you should read it is that it is conventional wisdom and you are perhaps better off understanding this and how it is wrong.
Friedman's explanation is a simple one - the world has transformed from a three dimensional phenomenon, a sphere, to a two dimensional flat plane where there are no entry barriers into the labor market. So, a radiologist in Boston can be easily substituted for a radiologist in Bangalore. Oh, how it would be nice if it were this simple. But alas it is not. Friedman, I believe, is well intentioned, but he mistakenly believes that he can find the truth through anecdotes. So, his empirical evidence comes from stories of things that he does not understand instead of the use of reliable demographic and economic databases.
He believes that 10 exogenous forces can explain how "the world became flat." While doing this, he solely looks at the labor market and ignores the effects of the consumer, monetary, raw material/energy, and fixed investment markets. He cannot distinguish between a symptom and a cause. These 10 forces that he claims changed the labor markets are not causes but merely symptoms.
Friedman is a name dropper par excellence, and rubs elbows with the elite. Unfortunately for him, he cannot detect competence or incompetence. One reason that this book will not age well is that when he wrote it in 2004 he was rubbing elbows with the incompetent elites such as Carly Fiorina who botched the merger between Compaq and Hewlett Packard and Nobuyuki Idei, the incompetent chairman of Sony. He praises these folks to win their favor, but reading this in 2005, demonstrates how little he knows.
A major problem that Friedman ignores is the inability of any government to impartially referee our global economy. No country has good corporate governance laws, and the US is becoming increasing unable to protect both intellectual and physical property rights. This problem creates new barriers and instead of flattening the world, it adds new walls and new traps. Poor corporate governance promotes crony capitalism and not the meritocracy capitalism that Friedman thinks it is supporting. Just look at the disconnect between executive pay and performance as evidence that many incompetent corporate chieftains are keeping their jobs and continuing to make poor decisions. American law is ineffective, the inability to sentence Health South's Scrushy shows that Sarbanes Oxley is not working, and the inability to put Ken Lay, Michael Eisner, and Michael Ovitz in prison shows how little protection the share holders have. Things are worse in China, India, and Japan where "transparency" is not even a part of the vocabulary.
The book is filled with inconsistency. It derides the inflexibility of the European welfare state, but calls for an American safety net to protect those from globalization. He calls for the enactment of "Hillary care" but cannot explain the reason that it failed passage in 1993. He praise the Asian "rote learning" systems, but later on calls on American youth to think unconventionally. He is calling on the federal government to do contradictory things such as keep minimum wages and promote market efficiency.
America's increasing indebtedness is not given one sentence in this book. Not only are jobs being exported to Southeast Asia, but claims and control on American assets are also being transferred. Increasingly, the important capital allocations in America will be directed by foreign executives who will be even less accountable than the Bernie Ebbers and the Ken Lays.
In short, Friedman is not qualified to write on this topic, but like the incompetent overpaid executive that he hangs with, he will be over paid and over read. At best, we might be able to profit if we understand how this "conventional wisdom" is wrong and then short sell the companies whose leaders make bad decisions based on this wrong analysis.
What about ecology and sustainable development? April 7, 2005
60 out of 123 found this review helpful
Friedman and his MNC coherts ignore the ecological damage
to the air and "commons." Their uncontrolled and unregulated
privatization of nature--everything from land, to water, to
seeds, to timber is gravely endangering our ability to survive.
Read Daniel Diamond's Collaspe before you swallow these ideas
whole.
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